Lecture 13 2/17/2011

In this lecture, professor Cargill spent a considerable amount of time discussing the topic of cognitive dissonance. During the Roman rule, the second temple was destroyed, and the Jews again were forced to decide if God was breaking his covenant. But this time, the temple would not be rebuilt, and the Jews would have little to look forward to. Previously, prophecy had declared that the Jews would be allowed to rebuild their temple. This time, however, they knew this was not the case, and so they began to move on with Judaism from a non-temple standpoint. Many of the rabbis realized this, and attempted to create Judaism as a religion that did not require a temple to function. They began to write down what they believed to be the "oral torah" and recorded this into the        Mishnah--the current Jewish bible.
But with the temple's destruction, the Jews began to realize that their entire center or worship had been replaced. Not only would they no longer have a place to experience God, they would also have no center for making sacrifices, or to go to be cleansed of their sins. Still, some worshiped at the temple mount and revered it as the holiest place on earth. But many others began to establish synagogues and worship in this way, counting them as similar to the temple. They believed that synagogues were almost as sacred as the temple, and that God's presence was surely present in their synagogues as well. We talked a lot about New Judaism, and how the 2nd Bar Kokhba revolt led to lots of ramifications for the Jews in Jerusalem